


Garbage In, Garbage Out

by articulatez



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Gen, Organ Repossession, Unhappy Ending, sex mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:06:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24601306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/articulatez/pseuds/articulatez
Summary: Graverobber's a stalker with a quasiplatonic crush. The girl wants a damn sandwich.
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheDandyCrickette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDandyCrickette/gifts).



The shouting chases him faster than any copper's stomping boots. Besides, these are his stomping grounds. Graverobber's technicolor dreads whip, corner, corner, grave, slam himself down to catch his breath, lie in wait panting and beaming, the flashlights coasting everywhere he's missed. Once they've passed he heads back from whence he sauntered, out of the graveyard. His coats are weighty in belly-up blue. The pigs, GeneCo's fists entirely stuffed up their sphincters, are easily heard in armored gear and they've only caught him a handful of times.

Not this time.

It helps he's slipped one of the women the finger, his index finger on her nights off when she's cursing into the crook of his neck. Vesper, a bitch as harmless as her vehicular namesake, her hair chrome purple and her surgeries paid in full by the golden egg: health insurance. Fucking her feels like fucking the system. He grins and starts to whistle, innocently twirling his monocle on his very naughty pointer finger. At the intersection of Thompson and Pine a corpse strews on the sidewalk, its ribcage butterflied and messily emptied.

Two garbage collectors in full suits help each other clean. He stops to watch, amused. The man hoses off the street and the woman hauls the corpse into the back of the waiting truck. Graverobber only guesses she's a woman based on her relative height and form, a guess confirmed when she unclips and removes her helmet to gasp and let her sunrise colored hair feather down her back.

She sweeps her gaze, checking if there's any remaining debris. Or witnesses, he supposes. He thinks she sees him watching and chooses not to address him other than a brief pause, then whistling to her partner. They load their equipment and escape, and Graverobber hitches a ride on the back, checking the cadavers' pockets.

He finds apartment keys, useless stun guns, and a coupon for buy one donut, get one free. Each stop, he hangs off the shadowy side, watching the pair work and clean.

The girl hasn't designed herself to be fuckable. She's as brittle as a reed, her muscle fibers and spine augmented as part of that work program, and when GeneCo's had enough of her then she'll have to go. It's mindless enough work. He tails her home and is stunned to find that it's a house, small and out of the way, a pink flamingo stuck into the dead lawn.

She parks her car. It's a green Kia, decades old and lovingly restored. After she gets out to fiddle at the door he skips close to peer in the driver's side window. Her helmet rests on her seat. Fast food wrappers blanket the floor and a baby yellow blanket blankets the passenger seat, dirty phlegm a grown woman's spit-up. Probably blood. He approaches the door, the clean-up crew girl fussing at her keys, and plants his arm on the other side of her head.

She screams and whips mace in a cute pink container out of her purse and lets him have it. 

He dodges an instant too late and screams, too. Snot faucets out multiple orifices and he procures a hankie to clean his face as he hisses, "Not too friendly, are you, Oscar?"

"The name's Claire," Claire says.

"No, it's-- haven't you seen Sesame Street?" He's coughing, and she takes pity and lets him in. Stumbling in the door, he sits on the first available perch, a half full recycling bin that smells like old bananas.

"There's nothing here worth stealing," Claire shrugs, and brings him a plastic basin of water. 

He washes his face, dowsing his eyeballs and nostrils and the stubble on his chin. The water swirls face paint white. The burning subsides to a sting. His vision clears.

She's precisely right. There is nothing here worth stealing. The flowers and the vase alike on the twisted wire end table are plastic and when he follows her to the bathroom the wallpaper is peeling off mildewed walls, patterned orange and pink dahlias.

"Not scared?" he half demands, watching curiously as she scrubs at her hands and face.

"Not really."

"Why not?"

"If you were dangerous you'd have attacked me, too," she says, and the logic is sound.

He leans on the door and looks the other way as she undresses and showers and changes into the pajamas she evidently set out before work. Naturally, he peeks at her shadowed silhouette on the shower curtain. She has those flickering blue lights of company tagged organ work. Spends twenty minutes washing her hair, shaving her legs, whatever girls do in the shower.

Graverobber could use a shower. He slinks out before she's out and remembers to take off his shoes and coat, hanging them in the narrow closet by the front door. There are no family pictures on the wall, no clue to a love life. What Claire does have are food magazines. They're stacked on the tables, they fill the one cinder block bookshelf. He's flipping through one, lying on her couch, when she comes out in flannel pajamas and her hair dripping.

"Comfy, huh, Graverobber?" she asks.

"I see my fame precedes me," he grins his sparkling black-lipped grin.

"That and you're sleeping with one of my friends." She opens the fridge and rummages.

"Which one?"

"Must be nice to be a man," she says wryly, as opposed to wistfully. When she emerges from the fridge, she has an ungodly assortment of ingredients.

The good: mustard, hot pickles, sauerkraut, corned beef. The bad: peanut butter, chocolate sauce, baked beans. The ugly: pickled watermelon rind. He watches her carefully assemble this monstrosity in three slices of pumpernickel bread, horrified and delighted.

"It is nice," he says. 

She makes him scoot over and sits, turning on the tv. It's the weather channel.

This may be one of the more surreal nights of his life.

"So you want to couch surf, right? You're a bum?" she asks.

"If you'd be so kind," he says. "Is there any favor I can offer in return?" He moves to brush her hair off her neck but she doesn't notice, picking up her sandwich.

"Take a bite," she dares, smiling.

He pauses. Stares at her. Glances towards the door. Back at her bloodshot green eyes. "Pass."


	2. Chapter 2

"Get up," she says, flipping on the living room light switch.  
  
Buried under a mountain of blankets, two bloodshot eyes wearing eyeliner and black shadow from two nights before blink. Claire's head emerges, curtains of her shining red hair and an oversized, strappy canvas sweater that looks an awful lot like a repurposed straitjacket.  
  
"Vesper, what the hell," Claire moans. "Shouldn't you be at work?"  
  
"My shift ended five hours ago, dumb-dumb," Vesper says, petting her head affectionately only to find that the shine is grease. She wipes her hands discreetly on the couch. Claire notices. "You didn't show at the jazz club tonight."  
  
Claire stretches, looking at the pill bottles, takeout containers, and cut-up magazines that litter the coffee table. In her defense, the trash can is all the way in the kitchen.  
  
"I got fired," she remembers, and puts her head in her hands.  
  
"Yeah, everyone heard," Vesper says, walking through the living room and picking up the mess. She whistles. "Hey! Did you find a healthy dick to fuck the sad out of you?" Tighty whities dangle from two short red-nailed fingers.  
  
"Oh, _god_ no. Those are--" Just in time, she slaps a hand over her mouth, protecting him. "A friend."  
  
Vesper was her other friend. Still a cop. It's hard to know with those hired guns when they decide duty takes priority, and Vesper especially has a bone to pick after Graverobber shoved her in an open grave mid-flagrante delicto to make one of his famed escapes.  
  
Since then, the big goon had summarily stalked and adopted her. He couch surfs two nights a week. Sometimes he comes in bearing minor wounds, and she treats him. Sometimes he brings a greasy bag of takeout and treats her. Usually they watch the weather channel, side by side, in silence and in the dark. Sanitarium Island, where it rains through the smog and the rain eats the topsoil off the freshest graves.  
  
"Okay, a friend." Without asking, Vesper tosses the dirty clothes in the hamper, the takeout boxes in the trash, and the dirty dishes in the sink. Some of the dirty dishes she declares beyond saving and throws them away, too. Then she starts in on Claire. "What do you say we take a nice, hot, soapy shower?"  
  
Claire tries to glare through her headache. "Please don't hit on me."  
  
"I'm as straight as a GeneCo spine, babe. All I'm saying is you stink to hell and high water. Come on." Deigning to share space with a stinky garbage girl, she plops down on the couch right next to Claire and jostles her in the ribs. "Why are you so down and blue?"  
  
"Imminent death, isn't it fucking obvious?" she says, cupping her hands into a megaphone. "I got fired! Bye-bye health insurance, bye-bye paltry savings account, bye me."  
  
Vesper stares at her. Vesper, who really is Asian and not Asian by design, who paints harlequin red and black designs on her face, tiny red diamonds on her pale cheeks, and draws long lines out from her blood red lips, who doesn't eat food and subsists instead on fat powder drinks and desiccated meat pills, looks at Claire, who feels like a zombie, rigor mortis and all. Vesper snorts.  
  
"Is that it? Here you had me worried you got dumped or learned a horrible state secret." She loops an arm around Claire's shoulders and squeezes.  
  
She stews and grabs one of her magazines, flipping to a restaurant review. A French café. Desperation fills her, makes her sinewy muscles flex and the augmented veins light up in electric blue; the nerves soon to be cut out as she gasps and gushes bright, venous blood onto some godforsaken stretch of concrete. She shoves the glossy pictures under Vesper's carved nose.  
  
"There's food I won't get to eat. Isn't it beautiful? French people are geniuses; they took meat sandwiches, fried them, dusted 'em in powdered sugar, and served them with fruit preserves. There are dinners I won't taste, soaps I won't smell, flowers I won't cut."  
  
"Boys you won't fuck," Vesper smirks.  
  
"No! My life is not the punch line of an innuendo. If sex didn't interest me when I had a life to lose, why would it have changed now that I'm going to die?! It's too soon. It's ending too soon."  
  
"Claire, you cart away the dead every time you go to work," Vesper says, flat and barely sympathetic. "Didn't it occur to you if you stole from the company this might be your reality?"  
  
She pouts and throws the magazine. It knocks over her umbrella stand, creating an awful clatter. "It's easier if it's not me."  
  
"Amen, sister. Amen."  
  
Vesper looks into her teary eyes. If anyone understands, it has to be Vesper. Her dirty little secrets are only known to Claire and Graverobber himself, Vesper's clandestine foe with benefits. Should anyone else at GeneCo find out, Vesper would be on her ass if not dead on arrival. Rotti Largo takes severance packages literally. Humans are rife with hypocrisy, and the danger adds to the fun, as far as Claire could tell. Understanding why people did the stupid things they did for the sake of fucking was guesswork.  
  
"... I do think you'll feel better if you shower and get your ass off the couch."  
  
She gives up.

* * *

Graverobber bursts in the front door of Claire's little home unannounced, as usual. A cartoonish bag, resplendent with cash, weighs down his arm. He drops it. Blood seeps into the brown canvas. Claire is stretched out on the ground, her skin flayed into Grey's Anatomy. Mercifully, he cannot see her expression, for she lies face down, a great, gaping loss where her augmented spine once laid. Her hair is matted with her own gore. How he hoped in that moment that Repo Man took her spine first and did not make her suffer the intimate, intricate work of removing her nerves, each fiber screaming.  
  
The months he'd saved for a hollow-eyed woman who cleaned his wounds, ate his paltry offerings, and wanted nothing from him but that he sit in the quiet and watch the nothing on tv that matched the nothingness inside her were months turned to waste. His charity became refuse at his feet. Plodding steps carried him, he knew not how, to her side. He checked her pulse. Stupid, of course. A waste, an utter waste.


End file.
